Can Bing Take On Google With These New Features?

Bing introduced a handful of new features. The one that will likely catch the most interest is the extension of its recent announcement regarding Facebook. Now, Bing will start showing you which of your Facebook friends have liked search results as they appear in your searches.

Social (Facebook)

“Starting today, if your search results include a specific link that has also been ‘liked’ by someone in your Facebook network the link will be highlighted as ‘Liked’ within Bing,” Microsoft’s Bing team explains. “This gets especially interesting for a query like ‘Xbox’ where my friend ‘Liked’ the ‘Kinect’ site and while our algorithms didn’t feel it was relevant enough to make it the ‘answer’ we reference above, we are still able to indicate that my friend liked that link that happened to show up within the results.”

This will be one clear advantage that Bing has over Google in terms of regular web search. Google has done a lot involving delivering social results, but Facebook data are THE social results that matter most – at least as long as Facebook is the dominant social site that it is today. With people constantly “liking” content all over the web, this can be a great indicator of relevance on a personalized level. It’s going to catch your attention when you notice your friend appear in the search results.

Bing has been running a similar feature in search results for several weeks, including likes from places like CitySearch, but there should be a much more broad set of potential results that will include “like” info now. It appears the feature may still be rolling out, so if you don’t see the “liked” results, you’re not the only one. I do get a message about it when I search with Bing, but after some testing, I’m clearly not getting these results.

For example, as illustrated by Bing here, I should see when my friend has “liked” a movie on IMDB underneath the IMDB result for that movie on Bing. I have tested this with a specific movie that I made sure one of my friends had “liked” and that “like” did not appear under the result.

Sports Tickets

Bing has also added sports ticket info from FanSnap directly into the search experience, so users can view ticket results from 57 ticket companies, see ticket selection and price ranges, find the best ticket prices, and access a “view-from-seat” feature.

Image Search

Bing has also made changes to how it presents and organizes image search results. “The first thing you will notice is our new Instant Answer that organizes a rich collage of images directly into the main results page,” Bing explains. “Once you click through to the ‘images’ page you will notice that we’ve populated the tabs with the most common search queries associated with a given image.”

“Instead of making you qualify that you’re looking for (Casablanca, Morocco or Casablanca, the movie), we have organized the tabs so that one simple click gets you to what you’re looking for,” Bing adds.